


You weren't what I was expecting

by PadaWinBaby



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: Fluff, Infidelity, M/M, Minor Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-25
Updated: 2015-08-25
Packaged: 2018-04-17 05:12:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4653645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PadaWinBaby/pseuds/PadaWinBaby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ryan Haywood has been kicked out of his house, and guess who just so happens to have a place of his own, with a couple of spare bedrooms?</p>
            </blockquote>





	You weren't what I was expecting

            It was a mad scramble through an empty office, footfalls echoing hollowly through deserted hallways as Gavin literally ran across the Rooster Teeth offices. He’d misplaced his house keys and, with Geoff out of town on vacation, he could only hope he’d left them at the office. He checked his personal office first, then continued on to the main Achievement Hunter office when he failed to find them.

            He checked his desk area thoroughly, if frantically, for a solid ten minutes before he sat back, cursing and thinking. He was drawn out of his thoughts by a soft sound, completely out of place in the empty room: a soft, quiet snore. Gavin peered curiously around the back of his chair, eyes scanning the darkness. For the first time since he’d come in, he noticed the dark shape of someone sleeping on the white couch in the corner, shrouded in the softness of the spare blankets and pillows that could be found in more or less every office in the building, because they were a company of hard-working, if lazy, motherfuckers.

            It was hard to tell, at first, who it was, because they were wrapped in the big comforter from the animators’ nest and had their legs pulled up into the fetal position. But then they rolled over and Gavin realized it was Ryan, easily the last member of their little family he’d expect to find crashing on the office couch. The man loved his wife, as far as he knew, and he was consistently the first one to finish his editing every day, so he never had any reason to hang around long enough to crash there.

            Gavin stared at him for a long moment, keys completely forgotten, before he got up and left the room. He went out to the kitchen and made a pot of coffee, dropping a handful of poptarts into the toaster after he gave the kitchen a cursory search to see if he’d left his keys there. He poured an extra cup into one of the larger mugs and dropped a pair of the poptarts onto a plate, then took it all back to the office. He squatted down by the end of the couch and waved the mug of coffee near Ryan’s head. “Hey, Rye-Bread,” he said, tone almost uncharacteristically gentle.

            Ryan jumped awake, and Gavin barely managed to avoid wearing the coffee before Ryan was looking at him with wild eyes, wild hair, and rumpled henley shirt. “Gavin,” he breathed when his brain engaged and he recognized him. The older man covered his face and groaned. All Gavin could think was to set the plate of poptarts on Ryan’s knees and hold the mug back out to him. “How long have you been here?” Ryan growled, taking the cup and sipping the coffee. He let out a groan of approval at the taste and took another, deeper drink.

            Gavin shrugged. “Ten, twenty minutes?” he offered. “Lost my bloody keys.” Ryan yawned and nodded. “I think I saw them on one of the tables at the podcast set,” the older man said, picking up and taking a bite out of a poptart.

            “So why’re you sleeping on the office couch?” Gavin asked after a few moments of silence where he’d considered getting up to check Ryan’s lead on his keys but decided it could wait. Ryan shrugged in response, jaw clenching with the desire to not talk about it. Gavin wasn’t having it, though. He nudged his friend, careful to avoid knocking his coffee. “Oh, come on, Ryan!” he insisted. “Did your wife kick you out for sneezing on the baby again?”

            “No,” he bit out. To anyone else, his tone would have been a warning to drop the subject, but Gavin was nothing if not persistent. He joked with and prodded at Ryan until he snapped. “She put me out because I’m in love with someone else,” he barked, getting up from the couch in a shroud of anger. Gavin’s mouth snapped shut with an almost-audible click. He watched Ryan practically storm out of the office to rinse off his plate and refill his coffee, trailing blankets after him.

            Gavin still didn’t know what to say when Ryan came back, so he decided that now was as good a time as any to check the podcast set for his keys. He scrambled from the room with an entirely different kind of urgency than he’d displayed earlier. To his amusement and gagging disgust, his keyring was looped around the dried-out wad of gum sitting atop the award that almost always sat to his immediate right. A glance at the clock told him he’d been out all night, however, and so he cautiously headed back to the Achievement Hunter office to begin work, disregarding his lack of sleep, and got to work. He quietly set up a video for editing, eying Ryan the whole time.

            He’d mostly forgotten about Ryan’s predicament by the end of the day. However, he decided to stay late to get a jump on the week’s editing. It wasn’t until he started yawning and eyeballing the couch that he remembered: Ryan would be sleeping there.

            Gavin pulled his headphones down around his neck and spun his chair to face his only remaining co-worker, also currently editing. “Hey Rye-Bread!” he called. When that failed to get the other man’s attention, he started throwing things at him. An Umbreon plushie bapped him on the side of the head, knocking his delicate-looking wire rim glasses askew, and Ryan finally pulled his headphones down, swiveling to look at the skinny Brit. “What?” he asked, tone flat and expectant.

            Gavin gulped, but pressed on. “You know, I have this whole new house,” he said. “Lots more rooms than I’m used to. You can- you can sleep in one of the spares, if you want. Even a double bed’s gotta be more comfortable than the office couch.”

            Ryan was quiet for a while, staring at him. After a while, he just snorted and slid his headphones back on. “I don’t think that’d be a very good idea,” he said. Gavin didn’t press, but he was confused. Why wouldn’t Ryan accept his offer? Did he actually hate him, as he sometimes appeared to in games?

            He tried every night for three solid months before Ryan finally gave up and accepted Gavin’s offer. He took Gavin home one night, backpack full of clothes on his back and a shaving kit tucked under his arm. He felt very much like a little kid going to a friend’s for a sleepover. “Big room at the end of the hall is mine, but you can take your pick of the rest,” Gavin told him, gesturing at a hallway with two doors on each side and one at the end. “Guest bathroom’s the first door on the left. You can drop your shaving kit in there. You want pizza, Chinese, Mexican, or Indian for dinner?”

            “Uh,” Ryan grunted, slightly overwhelmed. “Butter chicken sounds good, but so does pizza. Are you opposed to ordering both and splitting the bill?” He didn’t wait for an answer, instead going to drop off his shaving kit and pick a room. Gavin blinked after him and shrugged, going to order dinner while Ryan got settled.

            Ryan didn’t come back for a while, choosing to take a shower before dinner. He came out in nothing but a pair of ratty old sweats that hung low on his hips, towel draped around his neck to catch the leftover water dripping from his hair. Gavin’s mouth went dry when he saw him, and he had a hard time swallowing. He knew Ryan had some impressive arms, but his softly defined abs were a sight to behold as well, framed perfectly by his broad shoulders and lightly dusted with glittering blonde hair. He raked his eyes back up in time to catch a gently amused lift of Ryan’s eyebrow. “I-I’m sorry, what?” Gavin stammered, cheeks lightly flushed with embarrassment. The older man snorted and repeated his question concerning what Gavin had settled on for dinner. “Oh, um, I went ahead and ordered both. I wasn’t sure what kind of pizza you liked, so I got a regular pepperoni, but I also got an alfredo pizza with mushrooms, spinach, and pancetta on it. I ordered a double helping of butter chicken, some paneer, and a garlic and herb naan from the Indian place. We’ll have a proper feast, to celebrate you being here!”

            Ryan snorted, smirking softly, and ran a hand through his still-damp hair. A lock fell into his face, but he ignored it. “So we’re celebrating the fact that I got kicked out of my house and banned from seeing my kids because I committed emotional adultery?” he asked, tone somewhere between bitter and amused. Gavin shrugged. “Well, when you put it like that…” the Brit said, trailing off for a moment.

            It almost felt like something in Ryan’s chest snapped loose, and suddenly he was laughing hysterically. Gavin kind of looked at him like he was more inane than usual, but he didn’t stop him. He did, however, get up and awkwardly hug the larger man when desperate giggling dissolved into sobs that wracked through his body so hard that he rocked on his feet. For a few tear-soaked moments, Ryan draped his muscular form against Gavin, letting the skinny man hold him up and gently sway while he shushed him and whispered nonsensical platitudes.

            When he finally collected himself and stood on his own, wiping his face on the nearly-forgotten towel, he apologized profusely. Gavin hand-waved it and went to retrieve the first half of their delivery dinner. Ryan was gone when he came back, but he was only missing for a moment, gone to wash the tears from his face and hang his towel up. “Pizza,” Gavin announced, popping the tops of the boxes.

            The two men settled into dinner and video games like they were just having an informal lunch at work. The only real difference was the lack of recording equipment, and Ryan’s state of undress. There was more laughter, too, and a lot less yelling, except when Gavin accidentally unpaused their game while getting up for more food, getting their characters killed. That argument, however, dissolved quickly into a grappling match on the floor.

            Ryan ended up on top, sitting on Gavin’s hips, and the Brit went slack. They stared at each other for a long moment, both breathing just a little hard, and suddenly Ryan was kissing Gavin. The younger man was overwhelmed for a heartbeat, but when Ryan started to pull away, he looped a hand around the nape of his neck and pulled him back, effectively deepening the kiss.

            There was no questioning of motives, no real surface thoughts, just two men who’d worked side by side for years now, exploring a new and not necessarily unwelcome dimension to their relationship. It was all about the slide of their lips, the probing of their tongues, and the gentle application of teeth.

            Ryan finally tore himself away when Gavin made a high, needy sound. He stared down at the other man, almost incredulously, breathing hard. Gavin’s nearly-hazel eyes were mostly pupil, and his lips were red and swollen, making him look like a completely-ravished actress in some hardcore porn film. The Brit licked them self-consciously and cleared his throat.

            “Am I the reason your wife kicked you out?” Gavin asked quietly several heartbeats later. Ryan was quiet for so long that Gavin assumed he wasn’t going to answer, but then he nodded, almost hesitantly. Gavin smiled sadly at him and reached up to stroke a bearded cheek. “I’m so sorry, Ry,” he whispered as those piercingly blue eyes teared up again.

            Ryan felt pathetic, like the worst kind of loser, and barely human. After all, what kind monster gave a woman two kids and a good twenty years of their life, and then goes off to fall in love with another man? No matter how much he wanted and cared for Gavin, he couldn’t look at him without remembering what it had been like with his wife.

            “I will do whatever it takes to be what you need me to be,” Gavin assured him in that musical accent of his, pulling Ryan gently out of his own head. He held Ryan’s face in both hands now, and he pulled the larger man down so he could kiss away his tears. “I’m here for you, Rye-Bread, no matter what, until you get tired of me. And even then, I’ll still be here,” he whispered, as if he were afraid that too much volume would cheapen his words. Ryan smiled, though the expression was half-hearted at best. Gavin kissed it away with a gentle press of lips, and they resumed their kissing, though it was much gentler and lazier this time, without all the desperate hunger they’d exhibited before.

            Kissing Ryan was different than kissing a girl, Gavin noted mentally. It wasn’t just the scrape of his beard, though that certainly had something to do with it. No, it was also that Ryan’s lips were warmer, firmer, his hands bigger. Gavin felt like he could lose control with Ryan, and that would be okay, because Ryan had that air about him that suggested he was always in control, even when he was losing his damn mind.

            When Ryan pulled away a second time, Gavin let him go. The larger body slid off of him, leaving him cold and aching to have him back, but then Ryan dropped a controller on his belly, and Gavin remembered they’d been playing video games before all the kissing had started. He swallowed and took a deep breath before he sat up to continue their game.

            They kept their relationship largely out of the office as it blossomed. Eventually, though, they became so comfortable that they started to slip. Gavin tended to wear Ryan’s hoodies without thinking about it. Ryan stuck to Gavin in video games. They touched each other more, and joked more openly and frequently. It was mostly the little things that largely went unnoticed at first, but even little things have a tendency to add up. The first person who actually started paying attention was Ray, in his quiet, observant way.

            Ray was coming back from the bathroom as Gavin and Ryan were leaving. He vaguely remembered hearing that Ryan had been crashing at Gav’s for a while, so it didn’t really surprise him that the two were leaving at the same time. He was sure, however, that he wasn’t meant to see the way Ryan’s hand skimmed down Gavin’s slim arm from elbow to wrist and snagged his hand, threading their fingers together solidly. He didn’t say anything about what he’d seen, but he made a mental note to keep his eyes open from now on, wondering distantly just how much he’d missed. It didn’t take him long to realize that there was far more than just stealth hand-holding going on between the two, or that Ryan had stopped wearing his wedding ring.

            Michael didn’t notice the physical things between his friends. Rather, it was the verbal stuff. The excitement in Gavin’s voice when Ryan said certain things stood out to the Jersey boy like a big, flashing, neon sign, declaring that there was more here than was actually being said. He initially wrote it off as his boi having a man-crush on their old co-worker. Then Ryan started going out of his way for Gavin in the games they played. He was about to offer to shove them in a closet together and lock them in until they sorted their mutual crush out when Ryan started slipping verbally. The man started saying things like “us” and “we” and “our”, which wouldn’t have sounded like anything but Ryan getting settled as Gavin’s roommate if it weren’t for the way that Gavin just let it slide. He had never let Geoff speak for him when he was living with the man. He liked his independence too much to stand for it. But he let Ryan drop collective pronouns like they were nothing.

            Jack was the last to see it, largely because he kept his head down most of the time. It wasn’t until Geoff started making cracks about how Gavin and Ryan acted like an old married couple and Gavin objected loudly, insisting that they were in the honeymoon stage, if anything, that Jack even realized anything was different. He was the one who noticed the shared affectionate glances and the way Gavin always asked Ryan first, if he was offering to get things for the group, and delivered them to the blonde first. He wondered when that had started happening. He supposed they were sort of cute together, and he’d bet the British twink fit almost perfectly into Ryan’s lumberjack arms.

            The straw that broke the metaphorical camel’s back, however, came on a snowy December day. There had been an Immersion shoot, an episode that hadn’t turned out well and would never air. Gavin had gotten hurt, bad enough o warrant a ride to the emergency room. A concussion, Gavin reported to Ryan, hours after the incident. Regardless of the fact that Ryan had been doing voice work all day and thus been unreachable, Ryan snapped. Not at Geoff. No, his boss had only found out when he’d gone looking for the two missing members of his team. Not even at Michael, since the young man had broken his phone in the same incident. No, Ryan took his unbridled fury straight to Burnie Burns and Gus Sorola, the “scientists” of Immersion. Completely forgetting that they had no way of knowing, outside of office gossip, about the relationship between himself and the injured Brit, Ryan upbraided the two men with the kind of venom a lesser man at a stricter company might find himself fired for. “Boyfriend” was a weapon on his tongue, and he called into question the duo’s humanity for thinking that such a risk shoot would work out.

            He broke down at the end, and a startled, paper-white Burnie took him to the hospital among a flurry of fervent apologies and offers to make it up to both of them. Gav was being held under observation and had an ice pack taped to his head when Ryan walked through the door of his private room. “Hey,” the tall man breathed quietly, going to kiss Gavin gently, in spite of Burnie’s presence at the door. “You’re supposed to keep those beautiful brain _inside_ your head, babe.” Gavin tried to laugh, but tapered off into a groan that dissolved into a soft whimper. “Ry,” he whispered, barely audible. Ryan hugged him so tight, it was as if he was trying to hold him together and fix him. Gavin trembled in his arms.

            When they finally came back to the office about a week later, everything was different. It wasn’t just that they were completely open about their relationship, either. Lindsay shrieked and pounced on Gavin when she noticed it; Gavin, a man who wore little or no jewelry, now sported a gorgeous, thick band of black gold, set with a glint of peridot, on his finger. Lindsay’s shriek drew everyone’s attention, even Ryan’s. The blonde smirked and leaned back in his chair, letting Gavin regale their friends with the story of their mini vacation.

            While Gavin was recovering, Ryan’s divorce came through. To celebrate, Ryan took Gavin to Vegas. He proposed on the High Roller, and they were married that same night. In lieu of a honeymoon, they’d gone to see Gavin’s family in England. After that, there had been paperwork for citizenship, change of name, and taxes. The rings came last; Gavin’s had only just arrived the day before, via special courier.

            Watching Gavin talk, laugh, and blush among their friends, Ryan Haywood-Free couldn’t help but believe that the best thing that had ever happened to him was the falling-apart of his perfect, picket fence life, because he’d never been happier than he was right now. Gavin may never have been what he’d expected, but he was more certain than he’d ever been that he was exactly what he’d needed.

 

**~END~**


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